Correcting His Mommy

Alicia had to leave a little early today. So I spent some of the afternoon with Henry. His latest interest is sitting in his playpen that's filled with toys. In fact, we really haven't used it as a playpen since last spring. Since that time, it has been used as a open toy chest. Anyway, he has been requesting us to put him in it, which is a bit of a task, making sure that toys don't topple over on him.

He let me clip his toe nails today without a struggle. Previously, we had to wait until he was asleep and completely passed out to work on his nails. I did have to bribe him with a youtube.com video to get him distracted, but he knew what I was doing. Feels like he is becoming more mature every day.

I forgot to mention on our last post that yesterday, Henry played a hiding came with Dada. Henry would hide a toy mouse and they'd go and look for it. We learned this week that he knows how to say "mouse" and "mice."

It was very rainy today. We went on a muddy dog walk before it turned completely dark. Henry was placed in the backpack and we marched off. He loves calling out for Roger and Marley when they wander too far. Roger was hyper this evening, which is not like him. He acted like someone had given him a bagful of chocolate covered espresso beans or something. Henry called out Roger's name very clearly. Excellent enunciation.

Before dinner, Henry managed to get into our computer area off the kitchen. This is where Jeff's building our super computer (lots of storage for Henry pictures and video). Henry turned on the super computer. Got into the chair and then turned on the monitor by himself. But he hasn't master the keyboard functions yet...that's next week's task.

Henry had a big dinner. After dinner, I asked Henry to give Marley and Roger treats. This is sometimes challenging b/c he wants to give the treat to any animal other than the one whom I've specified. If I give him a beef stick and say "Would you please give this Roger?" He'll try to give it to Bitsy. Anyway, tonight I gave him some nice smelling biscuits from Trader Joes. The kind of smell like less sugary cookies. He gave the first one to Roger, like I told him to. The second one, he was supposed to give it to Marley but wandered off in another direction. I told him to come back. When I caught up with him, he'd taken a chomp of the biscuit. I told him to spit it out but he swallowed it. Ugh!

And then we played. Jeff read aloud from "Order of the Phoenix" as Henry and I played golf and stuff. At one point, Henry was in the ball pit. I'm convinced that asking him about the color of the balls is the best way to learn colors. I asked him, "Henry, could you get me a green ball?" Henry looked at me and said, "Please?" I was a bit stunned at being corrected by a 17 month old on basic etiquette. At some point, I asked him about another ball and was corrected a second time. OK, so I'm now feeling kind of sheepish. My child was right. I had in fact not used the magic word when making a request. Clearly, he has better manners than I do. I'm going to have to watch myself in the future. To my credit, I don't eat dog biscuits.

Henry took a bath. We had our computer time. He's in bed with Jeff now.